The bullet-proof armor saved me from becoming a charred crust. Hero Rusco to the rescue. All the while the crazy dragonfly veered around us like some colorful kite out of a nightmare. The creature slashed down on the Skugs again with its razor wings, spraying blood and guts everywhere. A trail of carnage painted the ground in a way that would make a war vet weep. Nothing could kill the insect. It wheeled around, regrouped, slaughtering Skugs right, left, and center. What did the Skugs want with us? A sick feeling came over my gut, as a grisly thought surfaced again. Suddenly it all began to make sense. I gritted my teeth.
“Die, you fucking mutants!” I peppered the approaching raiders with R4 fire, watching a bunch of them drop, their heads exploding in clouds of crimson. I kept them away from Wren and the others—for now.
Whatever it was, the dragonfly didn’t like its habitat disturbed. But how had it survived? The place had floated derelict for centuries. No one had disturbed it. Why?
I watched spellbound, aghast as the dragonfly creature tucked in its wings, plunged through the throat of a Skug and emerged out his back, somewhere at the same level as the kidney. The mutant split into two pieces in a glistening spray of guts. That Skug had been skulking up the feet of my perch to get at me.
That butterfly, moth, bat, dragonfly—what the hell was it? I could only guess that whatever CEO Dezmin had done, he had delved too deep and the creatures had nuked this operation, turning it into a ghost station which nobody would touch for eons. Except maybe some desperate travelers like stupid old us. Question was, how could an obscure alien life live that long? I mean, this was some centuries ago, right? Like what were the chances? Had the plants spawned that dragonfly thing an age ago and it had gestated to life just now? Unlikely. A better question was, how had it powered that mechno?
Or even better: what had it eaten during all those years? The hapless flesh of raiders? I shuddered. Maybe it didn’t need to eat? Maybe it could get its nourishment from anything? Even darkness.
I shook my head. Conjectures like this meant jack shit now. Jet Rusco had stumbled onto one of the mysteries of the universe, an archaeological goldmine, and here he was blasting everything to shit.
One of the Skugs had the sense to launch a flash bomb at the titanium base of my mechno tower. The metal hulk shook and shimmered with heat then began to topple. Red fire rose around me in the turret. “Shit!” I loosed a long wail of agony as the tower came crashing to the ground. Whump! The impact reverberated through every bone in my body, cracking my helmet, whooshing the wind out of my lungs. I crawled out of my hole, gasping, choking on the dry, tomb-like air. But it was at least breathable. Young Noss or somebody ran out, dragged me to safety behind the other mechnos. I wheezed out another gasp, looked up into a masked face with black hair behind the faceplate. “Not time to die yet,” the figure croaked.
“Getting too old for this shit, Wren.” The com was staticky, but still legible.
I felt myself slipping, my mind tumbling as I danced with a tribe of Skugs around an ancient fire… The Skugs who were once human. Skugs come to kill us now, saw off our heads and drink blood from our skulls.
I snapped out of my daze. I punched through my faceplate and pulled away the glass fragments. The two alien creatures buzzed about the chamber, twin horrors from another dimension. The Skugs peppered them with fire: blaster burls, ion-fire, heat sinks. This time a flare caught the eel-lizard’s wing and ignited it. The creature gave a mournful hiss then tumbled out of the air like a crippled bomber, skidding to the metal grates. It flapped around like some demented squid out of water.
I winced as a bunch of white-grey effluvia gushed from its side, along with a half dozen, strange, fist-sized bulbs, as if the thing were giving birth to a premature spawn, like a phoenix reverse birthing from a worm. I almost heaved. The dragonfly seemed to go berserk at the fall of its comrade. The winged horror dove over to the mangled, sizzling husk and careened into the killer Skugs with fury. A whistling shriek issued from its nostrils and it chopped and slayed with its razor-sharp wings.
A hunched figure stepped out to study the unusual ruin. The figure ran curious eyes over the twitching carcass and the otherworldly bulbs. Follee? Was this for real? The man wasn’t dead. He’d been hiding somewhere; hadn’t even fired his weapon. In a trance Follee stooped to poke at the eel-like body.
What was with the sod? The fool must be in shock. “Get the hell out of there!” I called.
I saw Follee’s hand flick to his suit’s belt. Why? I had more important things to do than babysit the fuck. I hustled Blest along who was in a bad way with that thing wrapped around his leg. Follee lumbered after us with a crazy grin carved on his face, as if to touch a dead alien was some novelty. Loony, dumb, loser idiot.
“This place is a robotic glass menagerie of death,” Wren rasped at me. “We’re better off taking our chances in the ships.”
I gave a grimace of defeat, seeing the chaos around us.
Follee croaked, “What about you and Blest? You can’t go out there in vacuum with screwed-up suits.”
“We’ll use the extra ones back at the airlock.”
“Think they’ll be any good after all this time?”
“They’d better be.” I turned to
